QA Financial Forum Chicago Recap

TTC recently sponsored and attended the QA Financial Forum in Chicago. The QA Financial Forum takes a different approach to software conferences by focusing on a select group of senior leaders within the finance industry.

This year’s conference was centered around quality assurance leadership within the finance industry. For TTC, this aligned perfectly with our core capabilities in implementing quality assurance solutions that accelerate digital transformation within organizations. TTC has extensive experience across banking, insurance, investment, stock exchanges, payment processing and more in America, Asia and the Pacific.

Unsurprisingly, there was a heavy focus on digital transformation. We had several discussions with conference attendees about the transformations they are leading, and the challenges currently being faced. The presentations and discussions confirmed what TTC has been saying for some time, in that QA/testing has a crucial role to play within transformation. Quality is more important than ever before, but QA is often still seen as a bottleneck. Organisations are looking to their IT and QA leadership to find innovative tools and approaches to change the status quo.

There were many great aspects to the event, but overall the panel discussions and openness of the panelists was the highlight. Typically at conferences you only hear the positive view rather than drilling into all the challenges, but at the QA Financial Forum it was far more common to hear we’ve come a long way in the last X months, but these are the challenges we’re going through. Most appeared to agree that cultural change is key, automation of testing, test environments and test data is essential, and that scaling success across enterprises is much easier said than done.

Finally, there was also an increased focus on technology trends and how they will impact the finance industry.